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I have this problem – a cheese pizza is a sin against pizza. It’s like someone started a pizza and got distracted with the laundry. It’s like photographing the sky without clouds. It’s like rain without wet. A pizza is a place to hold your toppings while you eat them. Picking the toppings, though…. a pepperoni pizza is just a place to start. The art in making a great pizza is knowing when to stop and what all needs doing in between. I give you my “Jody’s Other Pizza.” Perhaps some day I’ll divulge the recipe for “Jody’s Really Good Pizza.”

Ingredients:

Pepperoni

Sausage

Jalapeños

Black olives

Pine nuts

Bacon (added 2014/11/03)

Topped with extra cheese (to hold the toppings on)

A “print” of a “Jody’s Other Pizza” produced by Piccolino Restaurant in Hagerman, NM

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Words are sensible Signs, necessary for Communication of Ideas. Man, though he have great variety of thoughts, and such from which others as well as himself might receive profit and delight; yet they are all within his own breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to appear. The comfort and advantage of society not being to be had without communication of thoughts, it was necessary that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others. For this purpose nothing was so fit, either for plenty or quickness, as those articulate sounds, which with so much ease and variety he found himself able to make. Thus we may conceive how WORDS, which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea. The use, then, of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their proper and immediate signification.
– John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter 2, OF THE SIGNIFICATION OF WORDS

You really ought to suffer through the whole thing. It’s quite insane.

Now here’s something depressingly predictable: A meme in the Middle Eastern media that ISIS is the creation of Israeli intelligence. More, really: that ISIS isn’t merely an Israeli project intended to disgrace the Muslims, but something essentially Jewish, something actually—to quote one of our exhibits—”Talmudic.”

Let’s note up front that “ISIS as a Zionist Enterprise” is only one of numerous competing memes in the region’s media concerning this ongoing disaster, and that observers appear on Arab TV stations seeking to explain ISIS in terms of the region’s own culture, its failed politics, and even in terms of Islam. But the lure of a Great Conspiracy as an all-purpose explanation remains irresistible to many in the region; it strikes a popular chord because it seems to explain everything in terms of one party that is satanically guileful, while exonerating everybody else except the party that is always guilty anyway. All the clips linked below are from the Middle East Media Research Institute, which also supplied the translations.

Astonishingly, many prominent thinkers have embraced the theory without detecting the logical contradiction. Philosopher John Gray writes, “If Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true,… the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.” What is the contradiction in that statement?

Gray has essentially said, if Darwin’s theory is true, then it “serves evolutionary success, not truth.” In other words, if Darwin’s theory is true, then it is not true.

Every time I set down to seriously consider evolution, I run into this wall – If evolution is true, then I can never know anything. I can only believe that which promotes my survivability and the propagation of my genes.

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It does, however, relate directly to my post yesterday spreading the Walter Williams thought germ about the relationship between climate change and agendas. I did receive a couple of responses via social media implying that I was mentally defective for even questioning global warming.

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Climate change propaganda is simply a ruse for a socialist agenda. Consider the statements of some environmentalist leaders. Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s chief climate change official, said that her unelected bureaucrats are undertaking “probably the most difficult task” they have ever given themselves, “which is to intentionally transform the (global) economic development model.” In 2010, German economist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change official Ottmar Edenhofer said, “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.” The article in which that interview appeared summarized Edenhofer’s views this way: “Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection. … The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”

As I read through them, I was struck by the fact that not only am I susceptible to all of them, but many also double as heuristics – or ways that we can “cheat” for information that we don’t have or don’t have time to research. Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart

China has been successfully “cheating” communism by being capitalistic on the side, building the second largest economy in the world while quietly suppressing liberties. Have the limited capitalism that has brought China such huge financial success finally started to push against the communism of the Party? I’ve been watching this develop for years. Will China be the first country in history to be both communist and financially stable, or will the two ideologies of capitalism (Freedom) and communism finally be forced into the inevitable showdown?